A cunning blend of terror, suspense, satire and metaphysical speculation, The Green Man is superb entertainment and a masterly example of the literature of the macabre.

This is the seventh Sgt. Beef mystery in the Academy Mystery series, although it was the third written by Leo Bruce, the pen name of Rupert Croft-Cooke. It is a very rare book and is now published in the U.S. for the first time. In this novel, Beef has left the Braxham police force ...

The Coroner's Jury found that the boy hanged in the school gymnasium had killed himself, but Sgt. Beef disagrees. He takes a job as a temporary school caretaker, abetted by the reluctant Townsend—Beef's biographer—whose brother is a master at the school. Beef's methods ...

One of Sergeant Beef's most interesting and perplexing cases involves a murder, but there is no body to be found. Young Rogers announces to Beef and others assembled in a local pub that he has committed a murder, then takes his own life. But where is the victim? How did it happen? ...

Carolus Deene, the inimitable schoolmster-detective, is at his brilliant best in solving this case. Assisted, or hampered, by his "Watson"—the insufferably precocious schoolboy, Rupert Priggley—he succeeds in unmasking the perpetrator of what had seemed to be the"perfect" ...

"Five men occupied their usual places in a first-class carriage, but the sixth place was empty..." It is most unusual for the sixth man, Mr Parador, to be late. The five commuters are wondering what happened to him, when a strang-looking man enters the compartment, dressed all in ...

Carolus Deene, the history schoolmaster and amateur detective with his own inimitable style of solving mysteries involving violent death, is summoned to a small Kentish village by an old friend. In this, the eleventh Deene mystery to be published by Academy Chicago, the presence of ...

For cleverness of plot, detail of characterization and telling humor, few mystery novelists can compare with Leo Bruce, the pen name of Rupert Croft-Cooke, who died in 1980. He wrote more than twenty novels featuring Carolus Deene, the urbane, independently wealthy history master ...

Carolus Deene receives a letter from his cousin Fay: "A slightly unpleasant thing has happened here (on the Suffolk coast) and I think the sooner you come down the better for everybody's sake." Walking on the sands before breakfast, she had come upon the head of the celebrated and ...

The young man's plane is forced down by engine trouble in the middle of the desert. While his pilot struggles to repair the engine, the passenger, seeking shelter from the broiling sun, sees in the distance a large building. He finds to his surprise that the owner of the house is ...